LINE Did Not Bill You For The Overage, It Quietly Stopped Sending

Reaching the LINE message limit on a Japanese Standard plan does not start overage billing on your LINE Official Account. It stops sending. Additional messages beyond your allowance are only possible if somebody raised the additional message ceiling, 追加メッセージ数の上限, before the allowance ran out, and that setting does nothing until you change it. LINE’s own English help says the same thing in fewer words: if you have used up all of your free messages and want to send more, you need to change the additional message target limit.

So the failure is silent, and it is silent in the most expensive way possible. No error email, no invoice line, no warning banner on the campaign you scheduled three weeks ago. The send simply does not happen.

What actually breaks, in the order it breaks

Scheduled broadcasts are the first casualty and the one you notice fastest, because somebody eventually asks why the Friday promotion never landed. Step delivery is the second, and it does far more damage. Segmented sending can fail for a completely unrelated reason at the same time, which is why teams often misdiagnose the whole thing as one bug.

Work through them in that order when a send goes missing. The quota is the usual culprit, but it is not the only one, and the two failure modes look identical from the composer screen.

The ceiling you have to raise before you need it

On the Japanese Standard plan you get 30,000 messages inside the ¥15,000 monthly fee, excluding tax. Beyond that, LINE will sell you more at up to ¥3 each. The word beyond is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.

Additional messages are governed by a limit you set yourself, in advance, from account settings. Japanese operator guides put it bluntly: 設定しないと30,000通を超えた時点で配信が停止します. If you do not set it, delivery stops at the moment you pass 30,000. The default position is a hard stop, and the platform treats that as the safe behaviour, since the alternative would be charging you for volume you never approved.

You can also use the same setting deliberately. Put the ceiling at 5,000 additional messages and you have capped your worst case at ¥15,000 of overage for the month, whatever happens to your send schedule. Teams running paid acquisition into a LINE list find that reassuring, because friend counts can move faster than budgets do.

Everybody’s first instinct here is a plan upgrade

Watch the dashboard, see the number climbing, upgrade to the next tier when it gets close and carry on. That is the standard advice and you were expecting me to repeat it, right? Upgrading does work, and it works within the same calendar month, so it is a real remedy. It is also the wrong first move for most accounts.

Upgrading changes your allowance. Raising the additional message ceiling changes whether you are allowed to exceed one. An account already on Standard has nowhere left to upgrade to, so the ceiling is the only thing standing between a campaign going out and a campaign quietly dying. Set the ceiling first. Treat the upgrade as a question about next month.

The behaviour branches hard by plan and by market

Market	Plan	Monthly fee	Messages included	What happens at the cap
Japan	Communication, コミュニケーション	¥0	200	Sending stops for the rest of the calendar month. No additional messages can be bought at any price.
Japan	Light, ライト	¥5,000	5,000	Sending stops. Additional messages are not available on this tier, so the only remedy is moving to Standard.
Japan	Standard, スタンダード	¥15,000	30,000	Additional messages at up to ¥3 each, but only up to the ceiling you set in advance. Ceiling untouched means sending stops.
Taiwan	輕用量, light usage	NT$0	200	Sending stops. No add on purchase available.
Taiwan	中用量, medium usage	NT$800	3,000	Sending stops. No add on purchase available on this tier either.
Taiwan	高用量, high usage	NT$1,200	6,000	Add on messages from NT$0.2 each, stepping down as volume rises.
Thailand	Free	฿0	300	Sending stops once the 300 are used. No extra messages available.
Thailand	Basic	฿1,280	15,000	Extra messages at ฿0.10 each.
Thailand	Pro	฿1,780	35,000	Extra messages at ฿0.06 each.

Japanese fees above are 税別, quoted before consumption tax. Taiwanese fees are 未稅. Thai fees exclude 7 percent VAT. None of these figures converts into any of the others, so read only the row for the market your account is registered in.

The pattern worth memorising from that table is which tier can buy its way out of trouble. In Japan that is Standard alone. In Taiwan it is 高用量 alone. Thailand is the exception, where Basic and Pro can both keep sending, at different rates. If you are on a Japanese Light plan or a Taiwanese 中用量 plan, no setting anywhere in your console will let you send message 5,001 or message 3,001. The month is over for broadcasts, and it will remain over until the calendar rolls or you upgrade.

Step delivery is where this does genuine damage

A halted broadcast is embarrassing. A halted step delivery scenario is worse, because it breaks something that was already in progress for individual people.

When the monthly count is exhausted, step delivery stops for everyone currently inside a scenario, including users who are partway through. Japanese platform guides state it directly: even mid scenario, subsequent step messages will not be delivered once the plan limit is passed. Somebody who joined your list on the 20th and received day one and day two of a five day onboarding sequence never receives the remaining three. The sequence does not pause and resume where it left off when the new month begins. Those users have simply had a conversation cut off in the middle.

For a promotional broadcast that is a lost opportunity you can re-run. For an onboarding flow, a post purchase sequence or a booking reminder chain, it is a customer who was told something was coming and then got silence. Upgrading the plan mid month restores sending, which is the fastest available fix, so it is worth knowing that the option exists before you need it at nine on a Sunday evening.

A second silent failure that has nothing to do with your quota

This one confuses people because the symptom is identical. You build a segmented send, the interface accepts everything, and nothing arrives.

Filtering a broadcast by attribute in LINE Official Account Manager has two population requirements. Target reach needs to be at least 100 before attribute filtering becomes available at all, and after filtering you generally need at least 50 estimated recipients for the send to run. Target reach, to be clear, is not your friend count. It is friends minus blocked users minus users whose attributes LINE cannot determine, so an account showing 140 friends can easily sit below the 100 threshold.

Small accounts hit this constantly. The advice from Japanese operators is unglamorous and correct: below 100 target reach, broadcast to everybody and stop trying to segment. Segmentation becomes a real tool once the list is large enough that the filtered group still clears 50, and before then it is a setting that produces nothing.

A checklist for the start of the month

• Open account settings and confirm the additional message ceiling is set to a number you have deliberately chosen, even if that number is zero.
• Multiply your planned sends by target reach rather than by friend count, and compare the total against your allowance before the month starts.
• List every step delivery scenario currently running and work out roughly how many messages they will consume, since always on automation eats quota that campaign planning tends to ignore.
• If you are on a Japanese Light plan or a Taiwanese 中用量 plan, decide the upgrade trigger now, because there is no emergency purchase available on those tiers.
• Check target reach against the 100 and 50 thresholds before you build any segmented send.

One more thing worth putting in the calendar if you operate in Japan. From 1 October 2026 the additional message pricing changes to a two step structure, with messages up to 200,000 at ¥3 each and volume beyond that at ¥2.5, replacing the more gradual volume table used until then. Accounts buying under 50,000 additional messages a month see no change. Accounts buying substantially more will find the same send costs more than it did in September, so any ceiling you set on the assumption of older rates deserves a second look before the autumn.